Israeli colonies and its settlers are found all across Palestinian Territory, generally living in the vicinity of Palestinian communities, or even in their very midst as in Hebron. Of particular notoriety is the settlement of Kiryat Arba, which is home to some of the most radical elements in the Israeli Settlement movement, which neither shy from expressing their contempt for Palestinians or from acting upon it, as in the case of Baruch Goldstein, who committed the 1994 massacre at the mosque of the Tomb of Patriarchs killing 29 Palestinian worshippers.

The massacre, which ostensibly aimed to prevent the return of Hebron to Palestinian rule at the time, to some degree also effected the establishment of an international agency, the International Presence in Hebron (TIPH). TIPH is chiefly mandated to “provide by their presence a feeling of security to the Palestinians of Hebron” and to “help promote stability and an appropriate environment conductive to the enhancement of the well-being of the Palestinians of Hebron and their economic development.”

The impact of the TIPH, which has been active since early 1997, can hardly be described as successful if measured against its mandate, its presence however must have surely mitigated the gravity of the situation by some degree, and its regular reporting might yet prove to be of importance when made publicly available. Without intending to discredit the purpose of TIPH, or its efforts, it has become clear that an international presence without an empowered mandate can only provide a false sense of international intervention.

The former head of TIPH, Mr. Jan Kristenson, in an interview he recently made with Israeli press, described his experience in Hebron, warning of the effective cleansing carried out by Israeli settlers in collaboration with the Israeli forces: "The activity of the settlers and the army in the H-2 area of Hebron is creating an irreversible situation. In a sense, cleansing is being carried out. In other words, if the situation continues for another few years, the result will be that no Palestinians will remain there. It is a miracle they have managed to remain there until now." Furthermore TIPH reported that Israeli policies and the difficult conditions in the area of the city under Israeli control have already pushed thousands of Palestinians out of parts of Hebron.

These utterances though hardly novel revelations, and commonly under-reported, ought to command renewed attention from Israel and the involved International community to this most devastating and morally corrupt situation. Judging from the past period, the continued indecisiveness of the European Union to act, and the typical US support to all things Israeli around the US election period, the residents of Hebron will have to rely on nothing less than a miracle to be rescued from this eradicating peril.

In a special memorial concert, Israel paid tribute to the late Naomi Shemer, the composer and lyricist whose name is most associated with songs dedicated to the "Land of Israel" and the Zionist experience in general, from the kibbutz to the military unit. Her best known song, "Jerusalem of Gold", written and composed on the eve of the Six-Day War, became virtually the Israeli anthem for the occupation of Jerusalem. Naomi Shemer may not have deliberately set out to become the unrivaled champion of Israeli patriotic songs, but she has definitely struck a chord. Israeli audiences not only know her songs by heart, they always chime along in unison. Few Israeli performers combine such talent with the perfection of Hebrew.

Tens of thousands attended the summer concert in Yarkon Park in Tel Aviv. Dozens of top performers played her songs while documentary clips of her life flashed across an enormous video screen. And, in the open-air beneath the dome of stars, the audience sang along. In Israel, sing-alongs and other forms of collective singing -- in military units and the scouts, in the schools and youth clubs -- are more than a common form of entertainment; they are a fundamental part of strengthening the national spirit and collective memory. The practice has been adopted by the settler movements. Sharon, in particular, is known for his fondness for singing along with his friends. Israeli leaders are not embarrassed by such vocal displays, unlike Arab leaders who seem uncomfortable even when muttering the national anthem.

In one of the scenes that appeared on the screen between songs, Israel's national songstress said, "After 'Jerusalem of Gold', many criticised me for denying the existence of the Arabs. I deny the existence of those who live on the other side of the barricade in verses such as 'The markets of old Jerusalem are deserted' and 'We no longer see women on their way to the Dead Sea.'"

In response to these verses, Amos Oz had observed that the markets of Jerusalem were teeming with Arabs and that women -- by which he meant Arab women -- still flocked to the Dead Sea. She then says, "I'm generally a very spontaneous person. That's why I avoided an answer -- so I wouldn't slip up. However, I have thought about that question for a long time and now the answer is clear to me. He [Amos Oz] says that there are people. But to me a place without Jews is a deserted place. Any place without Jews is an empty place." The scene is greeted by deafening applause. From the left and from the right comes a thundering clap to national unity. Then, after Naomi Shemer uttered these racist thoughts, with the modest and touching candour appropriate to this moving interlude in a midsummer night's dream, the audience sang along. And they swayed together as they sang, as people often do when they want to emphasise group solidarity.

A massive wave of human bodies becomes an affirmation of collective identity. Worse, schmaltzy group feeling becomes justification for the most flagrantly racist remarks. Even when qualified by such expressions as "to me", "the way I see it", or "from where I stand", such remarks do not acquire objective or relativistic empirical grounding. Racism, however couched, is not a science; it is always an opinion, always "relative to me " or " to us ".

The entire Israeli national secular consensus was in attendance at the concert. That vast gathering was as representative as it could be of the social bases of Likud, Shinui and Labour, the very parties that are competing over the composition of a ruling coalition capable of implementing the plan for disengaging from Gaza as though it were a step towards a peace settlement. Although one of Shemer's latest songs cautions against "uprooting plants" -- in reference to the dismantling of Jewish settlements -- most of those on hand would agree that at least some need to be torn down. Precisely which of the few settlements that should be dismantled are details. What is important is to preserve the Jewishness of the state, to preserve the sense of nationhood built around a dream that began with the first Zionist pioneers a century ago and eventually came true, and even to preserve the dream of "Greater Israel", even if this remains no more than a dream and a patriotic song.

The three parties mentioned above, and their factions in the memorial concert's audience, are battling it out over whether or not the religious parties should be included in the next coalition. They are also fighting over the civil marriage code and a thousand other issues. However, they all agree on the need to get rid of Gaza and to build the wall. They agree on the need for restructuring the Israeli economy along the lines of the American economy and, hence, for reforms that would eliminate the Zionist socialist legacy that has entrenched itself in the form of a cumbersome public sector and large subsidies for the poor, elderly and infirm. They also all share a love for patriotic songs: songs to national unity in the face of the Arabs, songs to the Zionist past, the songs of Naomi inspired by the nationalist hue of the Zionist Labour Party and middle class consumer trends, songs to a wall between them and the Arabs.

If the words to Naomi's songs and the way they are celebrated tell us anything it is that the wall was built in the hearts and minds of the Israeli people long before it was built on the ground. The wall is there.

While the occupation is being celebrated daily behind that material and spiritual wall, repression goes ahead in the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli society takes little note. There are specialised agencies that dispatch reports, issue statements, lodge complaints and file grievances. But Israeli society as a whole, and Israeli politics as a whole, are not interested. They live behind the wall. The wall and the internal Palestinian chaos form the occupation's perjured alibi, the alibi that would have it that there's no connection between the murderer and the crime, between the blockade and its consequences, between the siege-layer and the besieged.

I am well aware that summer is the season for concerts and festivals in this region. People everywhere are on the lookout for an open-air concert, even in Ramallah, which is bending over backwards in its attempt to emulate some distorted image of Lebanon during the Civil War. Yet, in the same region in which we are living, in the same political space, people in Algeria are still being slaughtered for no other reason than madness. There are people who place bombs in the doorways of churches in Iraq, and video tapes of masked captors with blindfolded hostages in front of them have become routine. As commonplace as all these things have become, it is no excuse for Israeli society, in this hot and bloody summer, to evade its responsibility for what is taking place in the occupied territories. Israel cannot wash its hands of the consequences of its crime of occupation, which began long before all this and is still continuing.

There is something else that brings all those people together in heartwarming summertime unity, apart from open-air festivals, the beaches and holiday- making. This is the premise, which they are so keen to believe and have others believe, that states: "In the beginning was the terrorist." The Palestinians' only problem is their leadership, they say, as though the leadership created the occupation and not the reverse and as though the Palestinians had not launched "terrorist attacks" the Israeli army would never have had to go on the offensive and the occupiers would have been spared all that trouble of killing, repressing and degrading the occupied. This is the reasoning behind which an entire society can blithely turn its eyes away from their army's constant assaults on Gaza's poorer quarters, its raids on Nablus and its daily harassment of Palestinians at checkpoints. This is why that society remains unmoved by the death of Mohamed Shantir, who celebrated the end of his comprehensive examinations with two bullets in the head courtesy of an Israeli military unit on the hunt for resistance fighters in Tolkaram; by the death of Naema Abu Sahlul, 45, on 2 August in the course of the Israeli army's demolition of people's homes in Khan Yunis; by the death of nine-year-old Mohamed Zaraan on 2 July during a similar operation in Rafah; by the deaths of university lecturer Khaled Salah and his son Mohamed when their home was bombarded in spite of the fact that they had no connection with the alleged reasons for the bombardment, as is most often the case; and by the death of Mohamed Khalafullah, 75, buried beneath the rubble of his demolished home for the sin of living in Gaza in the vicinity of the Neve Dekalim settlement. The foregoing is only a small sampling of the escalating war crimes that found their way into the Israeli press in the opening month of the summer holiday.

Seasons change, from summer to winter and back, but the season of the occupation and its crimes in the West Bank and Gaza has lasted since 1967. The crimes have become so routine that they barely attract attention. The danger of the Israeli case is that Israelis do not admit that their senses have been numbed and that this helps keep the routine going. On the contrary, they feel more justified than ever, especially since the near halt in terrorist operations inside Israel. This they believe must be attributed to the efficacy of their security forces, since the resistance never explicitly declared a halt to operations of a certain type as a political gesture decision or for any other purpose. Israeli politicians and average Israelis are thoroughly convinced that the combination of their security apparatus and the wall scored a great success.

But then, if Palestinian attacks have dropped so low, how do Israelis explain the daily escalation in their government's acts of aggression and repression in the occupied territories, capitalising on the Palestinian chaos and the displays of political activists proudly brandishing their guns for the television cameras, and taking advantage of the Israelis' numbness and the distraction of the region's summer concerts and festivals? To search for an answer on the basis of the premises of the Israeli national consensus which links "Israeli operations" in the occupied territories to "terrorism" is a futile endeavour. There is no such relationship.

Rather, the answer is to be found in a fundamental and intrinsic relationship between perpetuating the occupation and imposing unilateral policies, and Israeli violence. Israeli violence -- or Israeli terrorism -- increases the closer they draw to the deadlines for imposing dictates on the Palestinians. Israelis would argue that were it not for the Qassam missiles fired into the Negev, Mofaz would not have given his orders to the army on 30 July to do what it takes to prevent those primitive missiles from being fired -- after an incursion into Beit Hanun the army focussed its activity in the large Jabalya refugee camp. In other words, Mofaz unleashed the Israeli army on densely populated areas adjacent to the Green Line in Gaza. In Ha'aretz of 3 August, Israeli military commentator Ze'ev Schiff wrote the "concept" behind the IDF's activities in Gaza "is for the local community to learn that there is a price to be paid by the community for allowing rocket fire from the area." It makes little difference that those who have to "pay the price" are Palestinians who happen to find themselves at "the crossroads of Rafah and the Erez junction," or even Palestinians living "in northern Gaza towns and communities". The strategy is to make the Palestinians suffer so that they behave themselves quietly and correctly under the occupation. "And what of it?" would ask the hundreds of thousands steeped in the Israeli culture celebrated in Naomi Shemer's songs. After all, those areas are not inhabited by Jews, so "to us" they are just "empty" and "deserted".

While writing this article I learned of the fire in a consumer palace in Paraguay. Three hundred people were burned to death in a mall. Apparently the owners of the mall had locked the doors when the fire broke out to keep the customers from running away without paying. Israel did something slightly different. It locked the doors to the whole of Gaza, then set fire to it.

Last week, Israel barred a UNESCO fact-finding mission from entering the country, charging that the Palestinians had ‘politicized’ the mission before it had even arrived. The mission was tasked with looking into conditions of historical sites in the Old City of Jerusalem, something Israel apparently found to be very threatening.

Looking at the state of Jerusalem’s eastern sector today, it is understandable why Israel would not want UNESCO or anyone else walking around the Old City, especially the Palestinian-populated parts of it. Because anyone who does, will see the devastation that Israel and its settlers have wreaked on one of the oldest and most beautiful cities in the world.

Excavation works are being conducted in and around the Aqsa Mosque to make way for more Jewish construction at the place where Waqf authorities say Ottoman and Abbasid artifacts have long been tucked away. A Muslim graveyard is being dug up just outside the Old City’s Jaffa Gate, to build – ironically – a museum of tolerance. Today, two stores were forcefully taken over by Jewish settlers in Al Hakari, one of the neighborhoods in the Muslim quarter and every day, it seems that more and more homes are either being demolished by Israeli municipality authorities or being taken over by Jewish settlers.

The “Judiazation” of Jerusalem is a term many Palestinians and Arabs use for what Israel is doing in the city. In a nutshell, it is the long-term plan Israel is gradually carrying out to change the Arab Palestinian character of Jerusalem. This means demolishing old and historical structures, displacing Palestinians, handing over their homes to settlers and trying to erase the Palestinian or Arab history of the city.

The sad truth is that, on the surface, Israel has succeeded in this to a large extent. Pockets of Jewish settlers now live in the heart of Muslim quarters and aim to take over more and more. Sheikh Jarrah, one of the more affluent Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem, is now pierced with Jewish flags waving from homes that have been wrestled from their Palestinian owners, and Israel’s light rail train cuts right down through Palestinian neighborhoods outside of the city center. The train, of course, is not meant to service the Palestinian population but rather to connect Jewish neighborhoods and settlements in the city, but the area confiscated from Shufat and Beit Hanina for its construction simply fell into the plan.

What the UNESCO mission would not have seen even if they made it into the Old City is the overall humiliation that the Palestinian population of Jerusalem must endure on a daily basis because of Israel’s military occupation. Trips to the Israeli ministry of interior must be made just to prove that one lives in the city for fear that their residency rights may be revoked; young Palestinian men are stopped randomly by Israeli soldiers to check their ID cards or just to harass them, and settlers are always given the luxury of maximum security whenever they walk the streets. If settlers want to march through the city, the Palestinians are told to close their shops, are barred for hours from reaching their homes if they run along the path of the march and are always the ones blamed if any kind of confrontation between the two sides breaks out.

Jerusalem is being squeezed by these measures more and more each day. But there is always that glimmer of hope, that strength that shines through proving that all is not lost. On Shavuot, Israeli settlers and extremists poured into the Old City, singing loudly, banging on the shop doors and waving huge Israeli flags. The sight was disconcerting to say the least. However, the afternoon of that same day, at Damascus Gate, passersby were met with a completely different scene. Palestinian flags waved in determined Palestinian hands under the threatening eye of heavily armed Israeli police and soldiers. The youths were fearless, demanding freedom, with strong, unrelenting voices.

The sight of the Palestinian flag waving at the entrance to Damascus Gate was a breath of fresh air. All is not lost and never will be because hope is eternal and determination and strength come from a never-ending spring.

That day at Damascus Gate is what all Palestinians must keep in their minds’ eye in spite of the daily oppression of the occupation. No matter how many missions Israel bars from entering or how many houses it takes over, there will always be those brave souls who, despite the risks, will always raise Palestine’s flag.

Joharah Baker is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.

There is no point falling into the pit of countering the claims being made about the death of Mohammed Al Durra, the 12-year old boy from Gaza whose videotaped killing was seen around the world. The boy, crouching in fear behind is equally afraid father as bullets whizzed around them, was killed admittedly by the Israeli army. Later, the army recanted after investigating the tape, saying Durra was killed by Palestinian fire instead. Well now, Israel is changing its story altogether, saying he was not killed at all. In fact, he was probably not even wounded and the French channel that broadcast the footage and brought some pretty bad rap to Israel, had most likely filmed a charade.

The reason why I will not waste my time countering this claim is that even with the great lengths the Israeli government went to to prove that the boy was never killed, it could not provide any irrefutable proof that Mohammed Al Durra – who would be 25 now – is still alive. No pictures, no testimonies, no hospital or morgue officials giving statements to refute his death, have been provided. Only sketchy information about ‘poor quality footage’ and the fact that it seems as though the boy moved his arm after he had slumped over his father following the explosion.

My point is this: indeed, Mohammed Durra’s death was at least one of the catalysts that fueled the second Intifada, and thus, was an important event in the history of the Palestinians. However, more importantly – most importantly to me –is the fact that this is about a boy who died in sheer terror, with his distraught father futilely trying to shelter him from the barrage of bullets coming their way.

Mohammed Al Durra was a boy, with a life, a family and friends. He died a horrible death and now he is being made to die a second one. I did not know Mohammed or his family, but I can only imagine how awful it must be for them to read these claims now and feel the pain of losing their child all over again. If nothing else, this is disrespect for human life of the worst kind.

Some may postulate that the rehashing of the Durra case is a personal jab at the French cameraman who shot the footage, Charles Enderlin. Perhaps. But as a Palestinian who has seen the pain endured by numerous families who receive the horrible news that their sons or daughters have been killed by the Israeli army, my concern is for his family and for his memory. He should be left to rest in peace. If Israel has axes to grind with French journalists or with the international community for holding it accountable for its actions, then so be it. Israel is not lacking in the public relations department.

That being said, there is just one decent thing left to do. Leave Mohammed Al Durra and his memory alone.

Joharah Baker is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.

This week Palestinians will commemorate Al Nakba, the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people when Israel was founded. Every year, Palestinians hang placards pointing to the right of return, they carry keys symbolizing the homes they were forced to leave and could not return to and remember the Palestine that was lost to them 65 years ago.

This year will be no different. Every May 15, Palestinian recall their catastrophe and demand justice. They demand that they are granted the right of return for those who were made refugees virtually overnight and were then relegate to a life they did not choose. But more than anything, they demand recognition of the tragedy that befell them rather than a denial that it ever happened, or worse, that it was of their own making.

It has been 65 years since Israel was established in 1948, which means those who were cast into exile are either very old or have long passed. Those who experienced the Nakba are now few and far between, clinging to those few precious memories of a small garden in front of their house in Jaffa or of the salty smell of the sea in their neighborhood in Haifa. The rest of us are either descendants of these refugees or ordinary Palestinians who feel their cause is our cause because we are one people.

But the Palestinians have made one thing clear. The refugee issue will not die with the last refugee. It is felt nationwide, the loss, the injustice and the fact that those who were forced from their homes have mostly passed, longing for their beloved homes.

We cannot turn back time. What was lost has been altered, destroyed, changed or taken over by Israel’s newcomers. What we can do is hold on to the right to be recognized, for the injustice to be rectified in word and deed and for Palestine to never be lost in our minds or hearts.

Joharah Baker is a Writer for the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.